FortySouth

Google has partnered with Open Technology Institute, PlanetLab Consortium and other academic researchers to release tools designed for measuring the performance of your internet connection, developed under the Measurement Lab.

• Network Diagnostic Tool (NDT) – measures your broadband speeds and identifies common network problems
• Glasnost – tests if your ISP is throttling or blocking BitTorrent traffic
• Network Path and Application Diagnosis (NPAD) – diagnoses some of the common problems effecting the last network mile and end-users’ systems
• DiffProbe (coming soon) – tests to see if your ISP is prioritizing or degrading certain traffic (traffic shaping)
• NANO (coming soon) – attempts to detect whether an ISP is degrading the performance of a certain subset of users, applications, or destinations

In the US, Comcast has in the past run into problems with the FCC for content discrimination, particularly of P2P streams. Cox is also not coy about it traffic shaping policies.

These tools are essential to helping you figure out if you are getting the internet service from your provider that you paid for.

Did you know there is a second Android-based phone in the market?

The Australian manufacturer Kogan announced today the Kogan Agora and the Kogan Agora Pro based on the Android OS (featuring) 262K color QVGA touchscreen displays, QWERTY keyboards, quad-band GSM and tri-band 3G (HSDPA) support plus Bluetooth 2.0, FM radio and a microSD memory card slots. Coming with a price premium of about 60 US dollars, the Agora Pro will also add a 2 megapixel camera, Wi-Fi and a GPS receiver to the feature pack.

The phone ships in January 2009 and is ready for pre-order.

In other news making headlines, Google is offering the T-Mobile G1 unlocked to developers!

Google is offering a development version of the G1 that is both SIM and hardware unlocked, meaning no more nagging at T-Mobile and waiting for ages to receive an unlock code.

Android is a software stack for mobile devices that includes an operating system, middleware and key applications.

Update: This is now updated with the actual video instead of just a link. I recently moved from Blogger to WordPress and the video got broken because WordPress does not allow for random embedding of code.
Anyways, I use VodPod now to convert the embedding code to a format WordPress digs. If you’re interested, here’s a great tutorial that shows how to do the embedding.

[vodpod id=Groupvideo.1871792&w=425&h=350&fv=]